There is a free market of vehicle builders - and has been since the dawn of the space age. Boeing, etc have extensive and current experience in developing and operating launchers.
NASA's only significant "living" experience is the Space Shuttle.
It was widely reported from a variety of whistleblowers at the turn of the millennium that the U.S. was preparing the U.S.S. Jimmy Carter to be able to tap underwater fibre-optic cables. See Bamford's Body of Secrets for exmaple.
I'd personally wonder what rock Bamford was hiding under then - because the USN was quite open that Jimmy Carter was a replacement [in capability] for Parche. You don't need 'whistleblowers' to tell you what the USN openly admits and experts in the intelligence community have already concluded.
But then, that approach, as opposed to pretending Bamford is fount of wisdom knowing stuff nobody else knows, won't sell as many books.
It should work in a variety of wavelengths. For 'house and office' use however, it boils down to two question: 1) how many common materials will take the markings (looking around my house and office, I see little metal and most of that is painted*), and 2) will the marking remain visible under a layer of dust (within a few hours of cleaning, you'll start to accumulate more - even if won't be visible to the naked eye for a day or two)?
*And how well a given metal accepts these markings will depend heavily on its crystal structure.
The US railroad industry has been dealing with blizzards for more than a century - they have very few (if any) problems. There's nothing for them to 'take heed' of.
Yep, all too true. Worse yet, very little of the money invested in creating the data center usually goes into the local economy either. All the hardware comes from a big warehouse elsewhere, and the bulk of the construction goes to specialists and big contractors from out of town.
If you have to abort the install - you generally have a brick. I know damm well what it means. Not to mention the fact the average home user probably doesnt't have the install disks for his OS.
And suddenly he's exposed to the problems with Vista, and the joys of Ubuntu by a person he respects and likes. Maybe he'll call up his geeky cousin later on in the day on Jamie's recommendation and ask him what this Ubuntu thingy is.
More likely, he goes and fetches Ubuntu (or some other flavor-of-the-month distro), tries to install it - and ends of with a bricked computer. (Or worse yet, ends up with a computer that functions just well enough for him to encouter the 'joys' of trying to get assistance from the 'community'.)
This is how mindshare happens. A war is a million little battles, and we just won one.
Yeah. And everytime someone gets frustrated because Linux won't run their favorite game (or application), or gets abused on the fora because he had them temerity to ask for help, or discover that the F/OSS program they downloaded doesn't actually have a manual or any resembling a useful help file... You lose a battle.
Half baked and abandoned hardware - yeah, that's what I really want in a device.
Things aren't much better over on the software [Google] side - where apps lanquish in 'beta' for years, user interfaces tend to be idiosyncratic, and updates tends to be sizzle rather than steak.
If one could fix the issue of social injustice and lack of opportunities / education I'm willing to bet most of these problems will go away as well.
Historically - the leaders, movers and shakers of revolution and terror come not from the lower classes... but from the educated classes, the intelligentsia, and the middle classes.
Um, no. If it isn't properly maintained and calibrated it can tell you something is hot - that is not. (And vice versa.) Depending on the exact type of meter it can even give zero or near zero clicks, while the material under examination is merrily radiating away something that meter can't detect.
I suspect that's an urban legend. (Lots of 'em floating around the Navy.) I've never seen anything, anywhere, indicating that the Navy was looking at energy weapons in that time frame.
At any rate, the reactor plant of the Enterprise was originally sized on the need to launch full (Vigilante) sized aircraft while steaming at maximum speed. Plus some additional capacity for operational reserve, in case one or more reactors were down, plus a fudge factor for future growth and to cover against concerns about reactor performance. There was also a general concern in the Navy at the time over the profliferation of electronic systems and their increasing demands for power.
Since the reactors ended up performing reliably and more-or-less to spec, and big aircraft didn't become common in the fleet - Enterprise ended up considerably overpowered, much more so than follow on CVN's. The follow on CVN's carry fewer reactors partly because of this, and partly because the individual reactors are so much more powerful and specifically designed for carriers. (The A2W reactor used by Enterprise is actually a slightly uprated C1W reactor - originally intended to be used in pairs for cruisers.)
In fact, Enterprise ended up with so much excess steam capacity - that (IIRC) half the steam recievers (a sort of capacitor to hold steam for the catapults) she was built with have subsequently been removed. Off-and-on there has been discussion of mothballing a pair of her reactors in place.
Mach 8 is about 9800KPH. Escape velocity from the Earth's surface is 40,320KPH. This gun is already firing at over 24% of escape velocity. A 64Mj gun would be almost 50%; a 132Mj gun would shoot projectiles right into orbit.
Sure, a 132Mj gun could _theoretically_ shoot projectiles right into orbit - but escape velocity isn't the whole tale. You'll still need a fairly large rocket stage to circularize the orbit.
I wonder whether coming generations of this gun could shoot unmanned exploration vehicles or satellites out into space.
Probably not. If you have escape velocity at sea level, you need an enormous amount of heat shielding to protect the projectile from burning up like a meteorite. Then you need to boost the speed at the muzzle even further to make up for drag and gravity losses. Then you need to boost the power of the gun even further to make up for the weight of the circularization engine and the heat shielding...
What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
Because doing so (stealing a satellite) is a Very Very Hard Problem that will cost billions do to, for very little return. (As well as being Very Obvious as to who did it.)
i took my gieger counter out and measured 350millirads.
And... you know the count was accurate, how? Oh, wait - you don't. Real geiger counters are precision instruments that require regular maintenance and calibration.
In particular, because it doesn't boil at the temperatures used you don't have any pressure in the reactor, so an explosion or leaking of primary coolant is a lot less probable ( and sodium or not, leaking of primary coolant would certainly be a show-stopper for a naval mission ).
Even so - what finally doomed the S2G (Seawolf) plant was leakage in the primary heat exchangers and in the superheaters. The Navy used twin wall heat exchangers, with a layer of mercury between the sodium and water sides, and both the sodium and water sides had persistent leakage problems.
To be fair, the S2W (Nautilus) plant also had leakage problems early on - but they turned out to be fairly easy to cure, unlike those in the S2G.
I remember reading about some fracas with some congressman wanting to install sodium-cooled nuclear reactors on submarines and aircraft carriers. Hyman Rickover, who was running the Navy's nuclear-powered fleet at the time, got hauled in front of a congressional panel; he dropped a small chunk of metallic sodium into some water and asked, following the ensuing fire and explosion, whether there were any questions.
An urban legend without a shred of truth to it. Rickover in fact was initially in favor of sodium cooled reactors - because, in theory, they would allow plants that were more compact and higher power than water cooled reactors. However, as usually happens, theory and reality failed to jibe. Sodium plants turned out to be heavier, more expensive, more complex, and far more maintenance intensive that water cooled plants.
Ever the pragmatic engineer, Rickover chose to stay with what worked and cancelled the sodium reactor program.
It's common knowledge in NASA that lots of US satellites are nuclear powered.
Well, no. The US actively avoids nuclear power unless absolutely because the great expense involved. We currently have great difficulty manufacturing them, which impacted the recent New Horizons probe.
It's actually not that dangerous, if it blows in re-entry it will go over a big enough area to just fade into the background radiation, and if it comes down in one piece they can go gather it up.
Well, no. US spaceborne nuclear power sources are expressley designed to re-enter intact, even in the worst possible case.
However, people are so worried about such things they would never admit it. This "may contain dangerous materials" is the closest you'll ever get to an admission.
Well, no. The fuels used in the manuevering systems are very nasty, and I bet the electrolytes in the batteries are too. I bet a goodly portion of the structure is beryllium - the vapors of which are toxic and the handling of which can be dangerous as well.
That debris field was the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw the headline too. I have no idea how frequently new, big satellites decide to plummet but it strikes this layman as a pretty big coincidence that this comes so soon after the debris fields got a huge boost.
It didn't 'decide' to plummet - this bird is in a fairly low orbit and destined to plummet. Usually they are reboosted, but since this bird has 'died', it cannot be reboosted.
When I first saw the debris field illustrated so plainly for Sir Patrick Moore (Watch the Dec 2007 "Sputnik's children" episode and skip to 26 minutes in for the best visuals), I was more than a little worried by the idea of a nation state intentionally accelerating towards Kessler syndrome.
There is no nation state capable of inducing such an acceleration that would not lose as much, if not more, than it would gain by doing so.
No, it's far more likely that they looked at a map an realized just how few and small those heavily populated areas are compared to the total surface of the earth - rather than indulging in a tinfoil hat reaction.
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ROTFLMAO. In a world where all [US] launchers were developed to goverment contract, you'd have a point.
We don't live in such a world. Not even close.
There is a free market of vehicle builders - and has been since the dawn of the space age. Boeing, etc have extensive and current experience in developing and operating launchers.
NASA's only significant "living" experience is the Space Shuttle.
I'd personally wonder what rock Bamford was hiding under then - because the USN was quite open that Jimmy Carter was a replacement [in capability] for Parche. You don't need 'whistleblowers' to tell you what the USN openly admits and experts in the intelligence community have already concluded.
But then, that approach, as opposed to pretending Bamford is fount of wisdom knowing stuff nobody else knows, won't sell as many books.
It should work in a variety of wavelengths. For 'house and office' use however, it boils down to two question: 1) how many common materials will take the markings (looking around my house and office, I see little metal and most of that is painted*), and 2) will the marking remain visible under a layer of dust (within a few hours of cleaning, you'll start to accumulate more - even if won't be visible to the naked eye for a day or two)?
*And how well a given metal accepts these markings will depend heavily on its crystal structure.
China doesn't have the same level of pollution controls as the US does - which is why they have the smog problems.
The US railroad industry has been dealing with blizzards for more than a century - they have very few (if any) problems. There's nothing for them to 'take heed' of.
Yep, all too true. Worse yet, very little of the money invested in creating the data center usually goes into the local economy either. All the hardware comes from a big warehouse elsewhere, and the bulk of the construction goes to specialists and big contractors from out of town.
If you have to abort the install - you generally have a brick. I know damm well what it means. Not to mention the fact the average home user probably doesnt't have the install disks for his OS.
Of course, in your fanboy gushing, you failed to adress all of my points. (Particularly the one pointing out that Ubuntu isn't the only distro.)
How I can I remember something that never happened?
More likely, he goes and fetches Ubuntu (or some other flavor-of-the-month distro), tries to install it - and ends of with a bricked computer. (Or worse yet, ends up with a computer that functions just well enough for him to encouter the 'joys' of trying to get assistance from the 'community'.)
Yeah. And everytime someone gets frustrated because Linux won't run their favorite game (or application), or gets abused on the fora because he had them temerity to ask for help, or discover that the F/OSS program they downloaded doesn't actually have a manual or any resembling a useful help file... You lose a battle.
It doesn't even remotely balance.
Things aren't much better over on the software [Google] side - where apps lanquish in 'beta' for years, user interfaces tend to be idiosyncratic, and updates tends to be sizzle rather than steak.
Historically - the leaders, movers and shakers of revolution and terror come not from the lower classes... but from the educated classes, the intelligentsia, and the middle classes.
Um, no. If it isn't properly maintained and calibrated it can tell you something is hot - that is not. (And vice versa.) Depending on the exact type of meter it can even give zero or near zero clicks, while the material under examination is merrily radiating away something that meter can't detect.
I suspect that's an urban legend. (Lots of 'em floating around the Navy.) I've never seen anything, anywhere, indicating that the Navy was looking at energy weapons in that time frame.
At any rate, the reactor plant of the Enterprise was originally sized on the need to launch full (Vigilante) sized aircraft while steaming at maximum speed. Plus some additional capacity for operational reserve, in case one or more reactors were down, plus a fudge factor for future growth and to cover against concerns about reactor performance. There was also a general concern in the Navy at the time over the profliferation of electronic systems and their increasing demands for power.
Since the reactors ended up performing reliably and more-or-less to spec, and big aircraft didn't become common in the fleet - Enterprise ended up considerably overpowered, much more so than follow on CVN's. The follow on CVN's carry fewer reactors partly because of this, and partly because the individual reactors are so much more powerful and specifically designed for carriers. (The A2W reactor used by Enterprise is actually a slightly uprated C1W reactor - originally intended to be used in pairs for cruisers.)
In fact, Enterprise ended up with so much excess steam capacity - that (IIRC) half the steam recievers (a sort of capacitor to hold steam for the catapults) she was built with have subsequently been removed. Off-and-on there has been discussion of mothballing a pair of her reactors in place.
Sure, a 132Mj gun could _theoretically_ shoot projectiles right into orbit - but escape velocity isn't the whole tale. You'll still need a fairly large rocket stage to circularize the orbit.
Probably not. If you have escape velocity at sea level, you need an enormous amount of heat shielding to protect the projectile from burning up like a meteorite. Then you need to boost the speed at the muzzle even further to make up for drag and gravity losses. Then you need to boost the power of the gun even further to make up for the weight of the circularization engine and the heat shielding...
Ah, so now the truth is trolling.
Because doing so (stealing a satellite) is a Very Very Hard Problem that will cost billions do to, for very little return. (As well as being Very Obvious as to who did it.)
And... you know the count was accurate, how? Oh, wait - you don't. Real geiger counters are precision instruments that require regular maintenance and calibration.
Even so - what finally doomed the S2G (Seawolf) plant was leakage in the primary heat exchangers and in the superheaters. The Navy used twin wall heat exchangers, with a layer of mercury between the sodium and water sides, and both the sodium and water sides had persistent leakage problems.
To be fair, the S2W (Nautilus) plant also had leakage problems early on - but they turned out to be fairly easy to cure, unlike those in the S2G.
Yes. They also (literally) bricked IIRC two reactors because the systems needed to keep the liquid metal hot, failed.
An urban legend without a shred of truth to it. Rickover in fact was initially in favor of sodium cooled reactors - because, in theory, they would allow plants that were more compact and higher power than water cooled reactors. However, as usually happens, theory and reality failed to jibe. Sodium plants turned out to be heavier, more expensive, more complex, and far more maintenance intensive that water cooled plants.
Ever the pragmatic engineer, Rickover chose to stay with what worked and cancelled the sodium reactor program.
Well, no. The US actively avoids nuclear power unless absolutely because the great expense involved. We currently have great difficulty manufacturing them, which impacted the recent New Horizons probe.
Well, no. US spaceborne nuclear power sources are expressley designed to re-enter intact, even in the worst possible case.
Well, no. The fuels used in the manuevering systems are very nasty, and I bet the electrolytes in the batteries are too. I bet a goodly portion of the structure is beryllium - the vapors of which are toxic and the handling of which can be dangerous as well.
It didn't 'decide' to plummet - this bird is in a fairly low orbit and destined to plummet. Usually they are reboosted, but since this bird has 'died', it cannot be reboosted.
There is no nation state capable of inducing such an acceleration that would not lose as much, if not more, than it would gain by doing so.
No, it's far more likely that they looked at a map an realized just how few and small those heavily populated areas are compared to the total surface of the earth - rather than indulging in a tinfoil hat reaction.